Stories from a Tower of Faces: The Sisters
We don’t know much about Sarah and Leah Michalowski.
They were part of the extended Michalowski family in Eisiskes, now part of Lithuania. We have a photo of Leah’s fourth-grade class. We have a photo of a relative who was a butcher. We have evidence of happiness, of community, of education.
Thanks to one member of the Michalowski sisters’ generation in Eisiskes, we have overwhelming evidence of their thriving Jewish community before it was destroyed.
Yaffa Eliach, granddaughter of one of the town’s photographers, spent 15 years scouring the world for photographs of her hometown, where most of the 3,500 Jewish inhabitants were killed in 1941 when she was about five years old.
But the images can only tell us so much. It’s why we don’t know much more about Sarah and Leah than their names. And yet we know so much more about this town than the many others destroyed 80 years ago.
After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, as many as two million Jews were murdered not in camps, but in and near their homes. They had little chance to run. In Eisiskes, a few escaped by hiding before and during the massacre. Most of those who escaped the initial shootings were later found and killed.
The “Tower of Faces” in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, doesn’t speak to this horror. It is a testament and memorial to a community, to lives well lived. Few visitors can relate to the killing, but they can relate to family moments — a wedding, a birthday party, or just two sisters on a bridge on a sunny day.
More stories from the “Tower of Faces”:
Jewish Victims and Survivors from One Small Town
The Soccer Players
The Youth Group
The Toddler
The Rabbi
The Guardian of Memory
